Have You Noticed The TPD?

Have You Noticed The TPD?

It has been approximately four months since the European Union's Tobacco Products Directive (TPD) was put into effect across the UK; its effects on the vaping community were entirely predictable. 

• We are seeing e-cigs advertised much less:-due to the limits placed on how they can be promoted.

• Packaging has started to be a lot less attractive:- due to the warning requirements placed on them. 

• A few companies have already started to limit the variety of flavours they offer rather than having to go to expense of providing proof to the powers that be that every ingredient they use, in every flavour, meets the reasonable standards of safety (sic) as laid down in the new regulations.

Predictably this regulatory burden has hurt small cottage-industry sized manufacturers & suppliers most while affecting the major players least. One must wonder if this result wasn't by design.

On the positive side, if you can say any government interference in your life has a good side; the TPD has paved the way for electronic cigarettes to be recognised and advertised as a medically certified stop smoking aid:- that is provided the e-juice used is > 20 mg/ml.

How this arbitrary number was decided on is anybody's guess and what the benefit of using the higher nicotine level liquids are as opposed to e-juices with lower levels of nicotine has never been fully explained.... Shocking? The 'Boys from Brussels'' have never felt a need to explain much of anything to us lower life forms.

Still, I view this as a positive development because I have faith that most of us will have enough common sense to draw our own conclusions about the amount of nicotine we want or need in order to gain the medical benefits that are now officially recognised across the continent.